The professional woman as mother.

Abstract

In ta ing about the professional woman as mother, one could L-al with the effects of the career on her mothering, the effects of motherhood on her career, or the effects of combining these two roles on her personal satisfactions. Most of my focus will be on the first: what kind of a mother is she, and how have her children turned out? But let me discuss the other two briefly, for they provide an important context for my major points. The dysfunctions of motherhood for the pursuit of a career have been pointed out by Bailyn,' Epstein,2 White,3 and others. We are handicapped in our carier advancement by geographical restrictions, family obligations, guilt, and prejudice. The husband's career considerations have been given priorities not only because of his insistence, but also because of our acquiescence. We have been assigned, and we have accepted, the major responsibility for child care and the household operations. As R o d has indicated, some men also have not pursued their careers with single-minded devotion, but have allowed their family concerns to temper their ambitions. But this is far more true for women. Furthermore, women have had that mixed blessing-the chance to drop out without censure. We have all returned from a bad day at work to a chaotic household and wondered why we ever left the kitchen. We are harassed, overworked, and in desperate need of a housekeeper. But for all of this, we may have fared better with respect to personal satisfactions than had we chosen one of the alternative paths that were available. This is not to say that there is no room for improvement, but the life that includes a commitment to the several roles-wife, mother, and professional-may be the richest of all. There are a number of recent empirical studies indicating that despite all of the difficulties, the bright and educated women who have combined all three look back with considerable satisfaction and a minimum of regretsm Birnbaum,* for example, compared a group of mothers who were also faculty members of a large university with unmarried faculty women, and with a group of mothers who had graduated from college with honors but who had pursued neither further education nor a career. The groups were comparable with respect to age-mainly in their early forties. Of the three groups, the nonworking mothers were the ones with the lowest self-esteem and the lowest sense of personal competence, including even sense of competence about child-care skills. These women also felt least attractive, expressed most concern over self-identity issues, and most often indicated feelings of loneliness. The subjects were asked what they felt was missing from their lives and the predominant answer from the two groups of professional women was rime, but for the housewives it was challenge and creative involvement. The single women, in this study as in other^,^ held higher professorial ranks than the married professionals. Both professional groups indicated high self-esteem and a sense of competence, but the single women were lonelier and somewhat less comfortable in their social relationships. The data indicate then that the woman who has combined a career with marriage and children has not pursued her career with the total undeviating involvement that has characterized men and single women. She has, in many cases, withdrawn from full career commitments when her children were young, returning